“You served me well, girl,” he whispered in the chestnut’s ear. “The Oldest Son guide you safely home.” He didn’t think he really believed in Adán, patron of beasts, any more than he did the other seven Creators, but good wishes couldn’t hurt.
He stepped back and swatted her on the rump, not very hard, with the rope coil. She lunged forward, then turned around and cantered back toward the river road. He watched her vanish in the scrub, then trudged back to the nervous yet still patient Lyuba.
He clicked his tongue sharply twice and waved the spear up and down. Lyuba hunkered down to her belly on the soft white soil, obedient as any war-hadrosaur. He socketed his father’s spear in the lance holder hanging on the left of the war saddle strapped to her ridged back and clambered aboard. Though she was smaller than a real war mount, he had a bit of a struggle: he was not blessed with height.
He took up the reins and clucked. “Up you go, girl.”
With a grunt she pushed her three tons up on all fours. He booted her sides with his heels and set her walking at an easy pace into the warming wind.
* * *
As if conjured out of air by the mythical Fae’s equally mythical magic, the monster appeared, rising from the yellow blossoms of a clump of custard-apple bushes at the base of a palm tree less than thirty meters to his left. It moved with a suddenness that made Karyl’s breath feel as if it had turned solid in his throat. The Allosaurus was shockingly big, lean as his Ovdan lariat, her face and powerful bipedal body dark brown on the back, running down in dagger-like stripes across tawny sides and belly.
Leaving himself no chance to think to flee, he turned Lyuba to face the Slayer. Couching his father’s monster-slaying spear beneath his left arm he booted her up into a rolling four-legged lope towards the monster.
The Allosaurus stared at them with widened eyes the color of blood, as if unable to believe what she saw. An herbivore, prey, rushing at her, the hunter? As much in apparent outrage as in challenge, she opened her jaws and vented a whistling roar.
Lyuba reacted naturally: with panic. She reared back so far her massive tail slammed the ground, fast and hard enough to catch Karyl unsuspecting and fling him backwards right out of the saddle.
Practice at safely falling off a duckbill’s high back was a major part of his training to become a knight, but he had never been pitched off with such vehemence. He landed hard on his right shoulder. Despite the springy turf, pain shot through him and blasted out what breath the impact had left him.
He rolled on his back and lay gasping like a carp. The Allosaurus roared again. She had a clear path to him. Lyuba was nowhere to be seen.
She had fled. Of course: it was in her belly, her bones, to fear the great meat-eaters as nothing else. She was a mere beast of burden; she’d never been trained to overcome that fear, the way a war-duckbill would. And even true dinosaur knights’ mounts could never be made entirely immune to that instinctive dread.
Overflowing with dread of his own, Karyl looked frantically around. His father’s spear lay at the base of another palm tree, ten meters behind. Rolling over again, he began a desperate three-limbed crawl for it. His right arm and hand dragged limp across the ground.
At least my weapon arm still works, he thought, without persuading himself it would make a difference.
Through palm and knees he felt the drumming of heavy feet as the Slayer pursued. He screamed, more in frustrated fury than fear. Futilely as he’d lived, he’d hoped to make a better death.
Another cry overrode his: a squealing bellow of rage. I know that voice.
Lyuba might have lacked the ornate wind instrument that served a nobler duckbill for a crest, which amplified and shaped sound, but she had big lungs.
Without slackening his pace, such as it was, Karyl glanced over his shoulder. From his right ran Lyuba. She was up on her mighty hind legs, shorter forelegs tucked against her chest.
He would never know what inspired her to overcome her fear and charge directly at the thing she feared most on Paradise. Did she love him that much? Was it some kind of instinct to protect him, taking him in her distress for her own young? He’d never know that either.
The monsters met breastbone to breastbone with a thud that rattled Karyl’s teeth. For all that she was longer, the Slayer weighed half what Lyuba did. The crash knocked the meat-eater right on her ass.
For a moment Lyuba simply poised there, staring down as if she couldn’t believe she’d won. Then she reared up higher, poising her hoof-like forefeet to smash down on her fallen enemy and break her bones.
Viper-quick, the Slayer struck. With the help of her own powerful tail she lunged up between Lyuba’s forelegs to snap her jaws shut on her throat.
Blood flew in sheets, deep red with highlights glinting in the thinly screened sun. Lyuba made a half-strangled squawk. Karyl turned away. He couldn’t stand to watch his friend die.
Though he instantly cursed himself inside for that betrayal, it was lucky. He caught himself an eyeblink before he blundered head-first into the tree. Blessedly, the spearhead’s gilded steel gleamed in pale grass not a meter away. He seized the ash haft and rolled over.
Under most circumstances, a big meat-eater would immediately start to eat an animal it killed, pausing only to fight if something not overwhelmingly larger tried to make it leave. But Slayers were as cunning as they were stealthy. They knew the tailless two-legs were more dangerous than their negligible size and absurd appearance could possibly hint.
And this Allosaurus was a seasoned hunter of humans.
Leaving poor Lyuba thrashing and bleeding out on the grass, she raised her dripping muzzle and glared straight at Karyl. Screaming in triumphant fury, she charged.
Frantic kicking at the turf put Karyl’s back against the tree. He raised the spear with his left hand. He tried to steady it against the coming impact with his right hand, but the arm wouldn’t respond. All he could do was tuck the once-more world-heavy spear beneath his good arm, brace the butt against the thick palm trunk, and breathe a hopeless but heartfelt prayer to the Creators.
As the Slayer loomed over him he screamed again, this time in terror. Great jaws opened to bite his face right off his head.
His father’s spear took the beast at the base of its throat.
The jaws lunged closer. The Slayer’s breath blasted Karyl’s face with heat and an almost venomous reek of rotting meat. He cringed back as if to somehow press himself through the tree and out the other side to safety, but its rough-surfaced wood foiled him.
It also kept the spear from being knocked from Karyl’s grasp. Despite his utter panic, Karyl never let it waver. The monster dug splayed rear claws deep into white soil to launch a last, despairing drive.
The jaws clashed shut a hand’s breadth from the tip of Karyl’s nose. The hunting crossbar had served its purpose, and stopped the monster from thrusting right up the shaft to avenge herself.
Blood fountained from the piercings in the leaf-shaped head in steaming red streams to shower Karyl’s legs and hand and face. It felt scalding. He blinked his eyes madly to keep them clear.
The Slayer rolled her eyes. Still she pushed with all the strength of her huge hind legs, accepting pain as the price of revenge. Karyl’s speeding heart stumbled as he heard the spearhead’s long, hollow socket crumple beneath the awful, insistent weight.
He threw himself to his right. The Allosaurus’s snout cracked against the palm trunk. Then, stymied, she fell heavily on her side and began the serious business of dying.
Karyl, scarcely daring believe he was still alive, began the serious business of crawling to safety. He thought he’d made it, too, when a dying blind sweep of the monster’s tail caught him and flung him six or seven meters through the air, into another custard-apple bush.
He landed hard on his left side this time. That shoulder stayed in its socket. But ribs broke with a stabbing like knives in his side.
Sprawled amid fragrant wreckage, he realized he lay right beside
a shallow pit dug among the bush’s roots. It was lined with torn-up grass and club moss.
A strange object caught his eye. Lying no more than half a meter from his head was something egg-shaped and perhaps thirty centimeters long, with an almost shiny ivory surface delicately flecked with orange.
And it was moving. As if of its own volition, it was rocking side by side in its shallow, padded excavation.
Belatedly Karyl realized: it’s egg-shaped because it’s an egg. Which gave him more insight than he cared for about what the half-lumpy, half-jagged mass he was lying on was, that seemed to squirm feebly and diminishingly.
Despite his agony in body and spirit, despite the nausea that tried its earnest best to make him puke himself inside out, Karyl watched in fascination as a crack appeared in the shell.
It widened before a furious assault from within. Two little black taloned claws appeared and tore the crack into a hole. A tiny head thrust itself out into open air, drab feathers wild and gooey with albumen.
It was the dying monster’s baby. Hearing Lyuba’s approach, the mother Slayer had chosen to hide away from the nest, to draw the intruder away where she could kill it with minimum danger to her near-hatching young.
Two big eyes, red and wet as its mother’s blood, fixed on Karyl’s. The mouth opened, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth. As if in recognition, the hatchling uttered a single piercing cry.
* * *
“So his Grace sees fit to knight you, despite your lack of years. And worth,” Karyl’s father said. The two sat side by side in gilded chairs on a wide wooden platform with wicker sides that swayed like a moored barge. “He has to do it, that’s plain. To win the favor of the unthinking masses.”
The Voyvod Vlad Mstislavovich Bogomirskiy of the Misty March spoke so softly the dignitaries who rode behind them on the platform couldn’t hear, nor the servants in their blue and gold silk gowns, who fanned them with feathers as they made their stately way through the crowds that packed the central square of the Grand Duke’s capital, Palashgorod.
In front of Karyl, a tree-like neck rose to culminate some distance above in a remarkably small head. At forty tons and upwards of twenty meters in length, the Thunder Titan was so huge and heedless that its appearance, especially in herds, that it tended to be a natural disaster to rank alongside the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and occasional star-falls that made life on Paradise so diverting.
Though the giant dinosaurs were native to Nuevaropa, this was the only domesticated specimen known. Grand Duke Frantishek’s pet impressed more than the “unthinking masses” who thronged to buy sweets and fried lizards on sticks from hawkers and cheer the progress of the hour’s young hero; it impressed him. Of course, the colossal beast wasn’t domesticated so much as docile, nor trained as much as accustomed from infancy to allow its expert handlers – men and women with the darkest complexions Karyl had seen, and tall yellow plumes nodding from their headdresses, specially hired and imported at appropriately titanic cost from far-off Afrika – to steer it, approximately, by whacking its great columnar legs with rattan staffs as they walked alongside.
Though its musty, dusty stench made Karyl’s head swim, his dinosaur-loving heart thrilled to ride such a living mountain. Almost as much as at that which awaited him, in the bearded and somewhat corpulent person of the Grand Duke himself, seated beneath a silken canopy atop a sort of step pyramid at the plaza’s far side.
Karyl’s father raised his head, as fine and fierce as any Allosaurus’s, though there were silver hairs in his mane of black hair, and more than that in his beard. He wore a short ceremonial cape of Green Horror feathers over a tunic in the somber Bogomirskiy colors of brown and silver. His arming sword hung from an unadorned nosehorn-leather baldric.
“Don’t be fooled,” he rasped, and now he no longer seemed to care if anyone overheard. “This all means nothing. Nothing. You broke our family spear, and with it much of our honor. Just as you let your mother and your sister and your brother die. You’re still a coward, Karyl. And you’ll always be worthless.”
Karyl’s head sunk down inside his own feather cape as if he might find shelter there. But I thought you’d be proud of me at last. At last!
The realization that his father never would sank like a cold trebuchet stone to the bottom of his belly.
But then in memory’s eye he saw the crowd of peasants, alerted by the bearers of the desperate petitioner’s torn corpse, emerge from the brush from which they’d watched the battle; and in memory’s ear he heard their voices call him, for the first time ever: hero.
Even the knight and double-hand of hastily mounted House archers his father had sent to drag him back had knelt to him when they saw and heard what he had done.
“I wonder if they’d cheer so loudly if they knew how much you shit yourself facing the Slayer,” the Voyvod said.
The words were meant as a slap. But Karyl felt no sting. Wouldn’t it be easy to be a hero if you never felt fear? Wouldn’t everybody do it? Couldn’t being a hero mean choosing to do something brave, despite being terrified of it?
The peasants in Zelenyye Polya had thought so. His father’s bravos did too. The enormous crowd, commoners and dignitaries alike, who had come to see him – him, Karyl the worthless, Karyl the despised – be knighted certainly thought him a hero. And yes, Grand Duke Frantishek of the Lesser Slavs must think it as well.
“They’ll forget you, boy, never fear. The glory will pass. And you’ll still be the same disgrace to my line you always were.”
Yes, Karyl agreed mentally. This will pass. I see that. It didn’t feel real, anyway; easy to believe it was transitory.
But he had something that was not.
It wasn’t the loss of Lyuba, who had given herself to save him, though that pain felt as if would never stop. It was the infant Slayer, still no longer than his hand and forearm, who upon opening her scarlet eyes for the first time to gaze upon Paradise, had seen Karyl first of any living thing.
Which meant she was perpetually bonded to him, believing him her mother. Which meant in turn he had that rarest and most prized of treasures for any dinosaur knight: a great meat-eating dinosaur, wild hatched and fierce, for his personal war mount. That was such a marvel, which happened scarcely once a generation in the whole Empire of the Fangèd Throne, that not even his father dared try to take her from him.
He dropped chin to clavicle and whispered, “We’ll always have each other, you and I. Always.”
In her sleep in her little nest of moss, snug between his silken blouse and bare skin, the Allosaurus chick stirred. He reached in to stroke her soft baby feathers.
She clutched his finger with tiny claws. And sleepily she murmured the first and only thing she ever said, the cry which had given her her name:
“Shiraa!”
A Word from Victor Milán
I've been a professional writer my whole adult life, and an obsessed reader since long before. I've also done time as a cowboy, semi-pro actor, computer support tech, and Albuquerque's most popular all-night progressive rock DJ.
I've published almost 100 novels and numerous short stories, including the Prometheus Award-winning The Cybernetic Samurai. I'm a founding member of the long-running Wild Cards shared-world project with George R.R. Martin, with a story in the newest anthology, Fort Freak. At the moment I also write novels for the Deathlands series.
I just sold an epic fantasy trilogy called The Ballad of Karyl's Last Ride to Tor. The first volume is out as The Dinosaur Lords.
I live on Jupiter with two cats, TJ and Squeak, and a burly dog named Emma who's subservient to them. I serve as Masquerade MC for Life for the excellent St. Louis science fiction convention Archon, as well as, apparently, for our fine local con, Bubonicon. I love reading, birding, games, recumbent cycling, firearms, hanging with friends, and walking the aforementioned Emma Dog in Albuquerque's scenic North Valley.
Thanks for reading!
Monsters
by Piers Beckle
y
“DOOR'S OPEN,” I CALLED, and looked to the left to see who wanted in. The woman who came through it paused on the threshold for a moment, surprised. Seeing a dinosaur can do that, if you're not expecting it.
“Mike Valentine?” she asked.
“Come in,” I said. “Take a seat.” I finished pouring my coffee.
It can go a few ways at this point. Some make their excuses and leave immediately. Others take the meeting, then cancel by telephone later. We decided to go with somebody else. I just can't afford it anymore. Don't worry, we sorted it all out.
More often, they just never get back in contact after they leave the office. They just don't want to admit that the transformed make them uncomfortable.
I hoped this woman wasn't going to be one of those. The rent on the office was coming up on two weeks late, and a private detective without an office, well, that's the kind of thing that people looking for quality in the detective industry tend to think of as a big black mark.
I sloshed the pot at her. “Coffee?” I asked. But she said nothing, just stayed in the doorway, neither in nor out.
She still seemed confused by the way I looked. We're getting more common than we used to be, but a lot of people still haven't met one of the transformed in the flesh before, and only know about us through what they read in the papers. Are we meddling with Nature-slash-God? When will this science madness end? New sex scandal! Can these people be trusted with our children? Monsters among us! That sort of thing.
I put the pot back in the percolator and walked behind my desk. “How can I help?” I asked, and gestured at the chair on the other side of the table as I sat down.
She made a decision and folded herself into the seat opposite. Her hands went into her lap, one atop the other, twisted together. People tend towards the tense when they hire a private investigator, and there's always a whiff of discomfort that it's come to this even before you take the rex into account. But this was more than that. The woman wrapped one of her hands tightly around the other, trying not to move them, trying to stay calm. It was taking a toll. Every so often she changed her grip slightly, not letting off the pressure for a second.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 26
